Having an Nvidia-card, should I be worried about this? So far I’ve read so many “Nvidia bad, Wayland no work” posts that I have just stayed clear waiting for a final confirmation that everything is smooth sailing.
I’ve been using Wayland on Nvidia with plasma for about a year and it’s been mostly fine. Only a few minor issues like night color not working or some Xwayland apps flickering, but the system feels far more responsive on Wayland so it’s well worth it to me
On much more recent driver versions Wayland support has been further improved. I suggest going with Fedora Silverblue since RPM Fusion is pretty quick to roll out new driver versions.
Having swapped to Linux on Pop OS and later onto Nobara recently, I strongly disagree.
As my personal experience on 525, 535 and even beta 545 with a 3080, so much as swapping onto a Wayland session implied lag, screen tearing issues, and stability issues / crashes on KDE and GNOME, to the point that I ended up selling the 3080 for a 7900 XTX because of how everyone said the AMD experience is so much better and it is.
True that I havent tested it on a laptop so maybe Optimus support from Nvidia or the latest drivers have added stability overall, but this was definitely a problem in desktop for the last months to me.
Thanks everyone for your replies, I’m really interested in KDE Plasma now.
I agree that KDE Plasma should satiate your desire for customizing the look and feel of your system. But, note that KDE Plasma isn’t properly supported on Linux Mint. Therefore, consider switching to a Distro in which it is; e.g. the KDE Flavors/Spins of Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu.
I always install the Noto fonts for things like emojis and asian characters, extra fonts to cover the Cyrillic alphabet, and finally OnePlus’s Slate font, which I fell in love with back in the days when I rocked a OnePlus 7 Pro.
If you are talking about the arch installer. It’s still a commandline. Nothing like the popular calamares GUI installer. Anyone can follow steps to an install easy. The real juice is in maintenance of the installation.
From a recovering distro-hopping addict, there’s two ways to dip your toes in to the various Linux experiences:
When you install your distro, partition a separate /home folder that is distinct from your root and boot partitions. There are many good walkthroughs on YouTube on doing this process, it’s fairly simple. Once you do that you can keep your home folder intact as you install different distros over the top. Just make sure to mark you /home folder each time and don’t format it during install.
Like another commenter said, try distrobox. It will allow you to test out the various distro bases pretty conveniently. Another similar option is learning how to set up virtual machines. Again, sounds more difficult than it is. There’s many good videos that walk you through the process.
Aside from the mechanics of testing out different options, I would recommend KDE as a desktop environment. Cinnamon and Gnome are both flexible, but do feel more restricting than I like. You can customize nearly every element of KDE, I really like it.
Really, most distros are fairly similar, aside from using different package managers and having different sets of software pre-installed. The desktop environment is where you’ll experience the most user facing differences.
If you like to tinker, make your way over to an arch based distro at some point. I’ve really enjoyed endeavourOS, but you will need to mess with config files to get your printer working and things like that.
AntiX/MX Linux, I’ve had great success getting them to boot on systems that were refusing to boot anything else, AntiX is my go-to distro for bringing new life to old hardware, it works with literally anything you throw at it.
Oh I’m aware the OS is free. The affordability I was asking for was for the actual computer to run it. I guess that part wasn’t Linux-specific. Mostly just looking for a good option for a work computer that will last a while. Will probably just get some kind of refurb laptop, I’ve always had good success with those.
But if someone has a specific recommendation I’m all ears.
If you are ever going to bring a Linux machine to display evidence, I would suggest going in and testing beforehand. Should be fine but always anticipate failures is my takeaway
The Lenovo Business Laptops always were super strong for me.
A bit on the heavy side (at least on the older models), but build like a tank and has an awesome keyboard.
But any halfway decent Laptop will run Linux fine.
What do you want to customize? That could give us some things to suggest. I might suggest installing KDE desktop environment and trying it out, it is super customizable and theme-able right out of the box.
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